Tuesday, September 12, 2017

John Carpenter Revisited: CHRISTINE (1983)

A few weeks ago, I saw John Carpenter’s CHRISTINE at The
Egyptian Theater in Hollywood…. and the experience made me giddy.Honestly, I was more excited seeing this
movie writ large than I was seeing THE THING in 70mm on the same screen a few
weeks earlier.Why?Not because I think CHRISTINE is a better
film.It’s not.But I love it more.

When the movie was over, a group of cast and crew members
went up on stage and tried to explain why CHRISTINE has developed such a strong
cult following in recent years. William Ostrander, who plays Buddy Repperton, gave
the best explanation.He suggested that
the revival is largely due to the enthusiasm of those who saw CHRISTINE for the
first time when they were in middle school or early high school. This explanation, at least, rings true for me.

I purchased a used VHS copy of CHRISTINE from my local video
store when I was in 7th or 8th grade, and watched it until
the cover fell apart and the tape broke.There’s an easy explanation for why I loved it so much.At the time, I identified with Arnie
Cunningham, and related to his frustration with the world around him—a world largely
defined by idiotic bullies and condescending authority figures.

In a way, CHRISTINE is a film that derives its power from
the ugliness of its characters—not just straight-ahead villains like Buddy
Repperton and his goons, but ancillary characters like Roberts Blossom’s sleazy
misanthropist George LeBay and Robert Prosky’s blustery hardass… Even Arnie’s
control-freak mother, played by Christine Belford.All of these characters exert an oppressive
influence on Arnie, until his world practically begs to be destroyed. I think
it’s safe to assume that most viewers my age got off on the “revenge of the
nerd” scenario that follows.CHRISTINE is
an enthusiastic middle-finger to the reality of being an insecure teenager dealing
with constant feelings of powerlessness and misdirected rage. In that respect, it’s a pretty ugly film.

Roberts Blossom in CHRISTINE

But the ugliness is counterbalanced by Carpenter’s stylistic
beauty—which is especially impressive in the second half of the film, as spit-polished
Christine cruises perfectly-lit, rain-soaked streets in search of victims.Reflections and camera flares give an
alluring dreamlike quality to the escapist fantasy.In the Q&A at The Egyptian, musical
collaborator Alan Howarth noted that each camera flare has its own music cue, which
further enhances that dreamlike quality.Did I mention that the score for this film is one of Carpenter’s very best?It’s simple, entrancing, unforgettable. In short, CHRISTINE is a brilliant exercise in
style, made by a cinematic genius at the top of his game.

Regardless, John Carpenter himself has always expressed
dissatisfaction with the film, citing it as one of only two films he’s directed
that he doesn’t “own (MEMOIRS OF THE INVISIBLE MAN being the other).In 2008, I pressed him on the subject—while
professing my own love for CHRISTINE.Carpenter
basically shrugged and said, “It was a job.”In a 2001 interview with Gilles Boulenger, he was harsher.“Whether people think it’s good or bad,” he
said, “I know in my heart I fucked it up because I was still wounded from THE
THING.”Obviously, I disagree.

Stephen King and Christine

Despite my love for the film, however, I’m aware of its
shortcomings—and two shortcomings in particular, which I think might sink the
film for less nostalgic viewers.Both
are problems related to screenwriter Bill Phillips’ adaptation of Stephen King’s
novel.Carpenter has essentially claimed
that CHRISTINE is Stephen King’s story, not his—but that’s not entirely fair,
because of these deviations.

#1.In King’s novel,
the titular 1958 Plymouth Fury called “Christine” is literally haunted by the
ghost of former owner Roland LeBay.As
Arnie Cunningham becomes obsessed with the car, LeBay’s ghost becomes a strong
presence in his life—until Arnie begins to see LeBay’s rotting corpse sitting
in the back seat, urging him to kill.

Fearing that such imagery would be “silly,” Carpenter and
screenwriter Bill Phillips decided to eliminate LeBay’s ghost from the screen
story.They crafted a new opening scene
to suggest that the car was simply “born bad.”According to producer Richard Kobritz, the new scene came about because “John
recalled something Hitchcock had said about an assembly line sequence that he
had always wanted to do.”What Hitchcock
wanted to do was make a scene where viewers watch a car get built from the
ground up.When the car is fully
constructed, the door opens and a dead body tumbles out.

I’m not sure why Carpenter thought this scene would be less
silly than seeing a ghost in the back seat.Today, he says he regretted the decision to eliminate LeBay’s ghost.Bill Phillips apparently came to the same
conclusion even sooner.Almost
immediately after finishing CHRISTINE, Phillips used a variation of the
corpse-in-the-back-seat imagery in a 1983 PSA about drunk driving.

Whether the change was “wrong” or not, Carpenter was unquestionably
committed to making a horror movie that didn’t rely on cheap shocks.Instead, he wanted to make a character-based
horror movie.That’s why the second big
adaptation problem is so glaring.Although
Carpenter got some great performances out of the lead actors (especially Keith
Gordon, who is on fire here), the movie essentially abandons the main character
arcs.

The novel CHRISTINE is one of Stephen King’s most insightful
character studies. Arnie Cunningham, Dennis Guilder and Leigh Cabot are fully
fleshed-out teenagers, easy to empathize with and easy to love.When their story turns to tragedy, it
hurts—and the pain doesn’t come all at once; it comes on gradually, over a few
hundred pages, as Arnie falls under the corrupting spell of Christine, and his
friends and family realize that their loved one is slipping away forever.

In the movie, this shift happens abruptly, and
off-camera.One moment, we are watching
pre-Christine Arnie (making nice with Darnell when the old fart offers him a
job) and the next we are watching post-Christine Arnie (looking cool at the
football game).There’s nothing in
between, and so viewers don’t get the emotional experience of Leigh and Arnie
falling in and out of love, or of Dennis loving and losing his best
friend.

Bill Phillips reportedly wrote more character-building
scenes, but they got cut at some point.Recent
DVD/Blu-Ray releases of the film feature some deleted scenes, but none of them
do much to flesh out Arnie’s transformation.Instead they focus on Dennis and Leigh’s budding romance.In the book, that plot development pushes
Arnie over the edge.In the movie, the
scenes are unnecessary because Arnie has already gone over the edge.

In his response to the film, Stephen King essentially pinned
the adaptation problems on the actor who plays Dennis (John Stockwell) and the
actress who plays Leigh (Alexandra Paul), opining that their performances are
“just sort of forgettable” and fail to “generate any real magnetism” with
Arnie.That may be true, but it’s not
the biggest problem. CHRISTINE the novel
and CHRISTINE the movie are simply two very different beasts.King’s story is mostly a melancholy tragedy
and Carpenter’s movie is a stylish revenge story.Once you recognize each version for what it
is, I think it’s possible to enjoy both.I love Stephen King’s CHRISTINE because it’s so heartfelt.I love John Carpenter’s CHRISTINE because it’s
so cool.In my opinion, it has just as much
style and panache as Brian DePalma’s CARRIE.

Carrie and Christine (blood relatives?)

Although the Egyptian Theater paired CHRISTINE with MAXIMUM
OVERDRIVE, that's why I decided to make CARRIE the second film on my double
bill.I realize that this is a different
kind of double bill than the ones in my previous “Stephen King Revisited” essays—primarily
because it de-emphasizes Carpenter’s authorship.Pairing CHRISTINE with CARRIE reiterates the idea of CHRISTINE as a King
movie rather than a Carpenter movie.It
also aligns Carpenter with a filmmaker that he doesn’t particularly like.

In a 1978 interview, Carpenter dismissed DePalma’s early
horror films (SISTERS, OBSESSION, CARRIE) as unimaginative imitations of
Hitchcock.He opined, “Those pictures
aren’t making creative use of the lessons Hitchcock has taught us.They’re just trying to be copies of Hitchcock
originals.”During that early stage of
in his career, DePalma was frequently maligned as a Hitchcock imitator.But, then, so was Carpenter.To a certain extent, DePalma embraced the
label while Carpenter rejected it.

Certainly, Carpenter learned the techniques of suspense from
Hitchcock (as HALLOWEEN demonstrates), but the filmmaker insists that he is not
the same type of storyteller.In conversation
with Gilles Boulenger, Carpenter criticized Hitchcock as a “cold” director, explaining,
“His suspense scenes are just devoid of anything surprising.As soon as you get his trick, there he
is.That’s just not my way of doing
it.I entertain much more connection
with the Hawksian school.”Hawks worked
more closely with actors, and was generally inclined to throw out a detailed
shooting plan in order to improvise and find the depth and warmth of his characters
and their story.

By 1997, Carpenter seemed to have modified his opinion of
DePalma, including him on a list of revered filmmakers who have all had “bad
days.”He concluded, “It’s really all in
your story.If you have the right kind
of story that lends itself to suspense, then you have it made.When the story is something else, you’re
kidding yourself.You can play all the
tried and true techniques, but they won’t work.”That seems to sum up his feelings about
CHRISTINE.For him, it was too much of a
cold stylistic exercise. Simply a “bad day.”

For viewers who haven’t read the source novel, or who don’t
instinctively identify with Arnie, he might be right.On the other hand, if you love Carpenter’s
unique style of visual storytelling, there’s plenty to love about
CHRISTINE.Even Stephen King, despite his
completely understandable reservations with the story changes, concluded,
“There’s still a lot of Carpenter […] the excitement that he can generate.When the car’s going along the road, and it’s
in flames, and it’s chasing these people, that’s pretty good.”

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About Me

Author - Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film (McFarland, 2004), The Making of T.S. Eliot: A Study of the Literary Influences (McFarland, 2009), Not Bad for a Human: The Life and Films of Lance Henriksen (Bloody Pulp, 2011), To Hell You Ride (Dark Horse Comics, 2013), A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin (BearManor, 2014), Beyond Fear: Reflections on Stephen King, Wes Craven and George Romero's Living Dead (BearManor, 2014), and The Quick, The Dead and the Revived: The Many Lives of the Western Film (McFarland, 2016).